nichola khan
University of Brighton, School of Applied Social Sciences, Faculty Member
- Social Sciences, Psychiatric anthropology, Violence, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ethnography, and 19 moreMigration, Diaspora and transnationalism, Transnational migration, Social Anthropology, Mental Health, Migration Studies, Anthropology of Mobility, Karachi, Culture and Mental Health, Philosophy of Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of Death, Anthropology of Dreams and Dreaming, Transnationalism, Philosophy Of Religion, Twentieth-Century American Literature, Stanley Cavell, Sociology of Knowledge, and Sociologyedit
- Reader in Anthropology. Director of the Centre for Research in Spatial Environmental and Cultural Politicsedit
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This article revisits my anthropological fieldwork over ten years with men who became mercenaries in Karachi’s MQM party. In my previous interpretations of their stories I sought to develop a moral-political counter position from which to... more
This article revisits my anthropological fieldwork over ten years with men who became mercenaries in Karachi’s MQM party. In my previous interpretations of their stories I sought to develop a moral-political counter position from which to refute the psychopathological, defend their humanity and, as I was often urged in my fieldwork, ‘tell’ their pain to the world. Reflecting anew on one case, ‘Arshad’, I consider how tales of fantastic violence, even when they are racked with terror and torment, are perversely enthralling. I link this to ways dissociative patterns are fostered culturally, and by political leaders, creating simultaneous modes of attachment and detachment for people living amidst extreme violence. Arshad’s self-aggrandising stories were necessary for coping with and detaching from an increasingly fragmenting reality—until his fantasy became a punishing, perpetual present. Researching his story propelled me over time towards a radical pacifism and a growing discomfort at his belief in his actions as wholly justified. For Arshad, this means I have betrayed him. It also raises important ethical questions regarding the limits of sympathy for his plight. Last, in their phantasmagoric appeal, I wonder if such stories can become a site of resistance, a way to write against violence?
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A new book by a journalist follows five interlocutors through Karachi’s recent history of rapid expansion, corruption, violence, and civil society efforts.
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This study follows UK Afghan migrants on a return visit to Northwest Pakistan. Combining theorizations of mobility, liminality, and commensality, it takes the picnic trip ( little-explored cultural lens through which to analyse symbolic... more
This study follows UK Afghan migrants on a return visit to Northwest Pakistan. Combining theorizations of mobility, liminality, and commensality, it takes the picnic trip ( little-explored cultural lens through which to analyse symbolic formations of freedom, the shaping of Pakhtun transnational labour, and social hierarchies constituted through migration and return. As potent imaginary sites of remembering and forgetting, arrived at, routes of flight and return, and the burden of multi-levelled constellations of political and economic insecurity on refugees living between the UK and Pakistan. The article argues thatchakar) as achakar map destinations left and not-yetchakar are at once therapeutic and reproductive of ways in which personal and systemic realities combine features of hierarchy, exploitation, and patriarchy. They sustain participants in a tension between desires to preserve the hierarchies they conceal, and desires for more freedom. These contradictory experiences are usefully analysed through the emblematic arc of the ‘round trip’.
Research Interests: Sociology, Archaeology, Gender Studies, Anthropology, Liminality, and 3 moreTaste, Hierarchy, and Afghan
Synthesizing political, anthropological and psychological perspectives, this book addresses the everyday causes and appeal of long-term involvement in extreme political violence in urban Pakistan. Taking Pakistan’s ethno nationalist... more
Synthesizing political, anthropological and psychological perspectives, this book addresses the everyday causes and appeal of long-term involvement in extreme political violence in urban Pakistan. Taking Pakistan’s ethno nationalist Mohajir party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) as a case study, it explores how certain men from the ethnic community of Mohajirs are recruited to the roles and statuses of political killers, and sustain violence as a primary social identity and lifestyle over a period of some years. By drawing on detailed fieldwork in areas involved in the Karachi conflict, the author contributes to understandings of violence, tracing the development of violent aspects of Mohajir nationalism via an exploration of political and cultural contexts of Pakistan’s history, and highlighting the repetitive homology of the conflict with the earlier violence of Partition. Through a local comparison of ethnic and religious militancy she also updates the current situation of social and cultural change in Karachi, which is dominantly framed in terms of Islamist radicalization and modernization. In her examination, governance and civil society issues are integrated with the political and psychological dimensions of mobilization processes and violence at micro-, meso- and macro- levels. This book injects a critical and innovative voice into the ongoing debates about the nature and meaning of radicalization and violence, as well as the specific implications it has for similar, contemporary conflicts in Pakistan and the developing world. Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Post-Partition History of the Mohajirs in Sindh 3. The Transformation 4. Partition Reprised: Grievance, Unification and Violence 5. Women in the Homeland 6. Jamaat E Islami and the Ijt in Liaquatabad 7. Conclusion
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Drawing on the British film Out of the Ashes, and ethnography amongst UK Afghan migrants, this article examines images of war in Afghanistan, the discourse of civilisation and the politics of citizenship – as refracted through the... more
Drawing on the British film Out of the Ashes, and ethnography amongst UK Afghan migrants, this article examines images of war in Afghanistan, the discourse of civilisation and the politics of citizenship – as refracted through the representation (cricket) and praxis (football) of sport. Placing the film in a wider context of discourses that subordinate Afghans to the anachronistic fears or illimitable compassion of audiences of ‘Western’ nations engaged simultaneously in military and humanitarian projects in Afghanistan, it asks: to what extent does its narrative of peace-building, progress and internationalisation (‘making it to the world stage’) define Afghanistan's entry into a ‘civilising project’ (Elias 1994 [original 1939])? What can a social and cultural analysis reveal about the processes and structures that govern politics, migration, identity – and ways Afghanistan inhabits the popular imagination? What is the peculiar potential of sport to pose a ‘solution’ to problems of violence, societal conflict and ‘integration’ for Afghans in a small UK city? To what extent do sporting practices reproduce, transform or create new – forms of power, racism and difference involving Afghanistan, and Afghans in diasporic locations?
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Synthesizing political, anthropological and psychological perspectives, this book addresses the everyday causes and appeal of long-term involvement in extreme political violence in urban Pakistan. Taking Pakistan's ethno nationalist... more
Synthesizing political, anthropological and psychological perspectives, this book addresses the everyday causes and appeal of long-term involvement in extreme political violence in urban Pakistan. Taking Pakistan's ethno nationalist Mohajir party, the Muttahida Qaumi ...
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This article investigates practices of militancy amongst young men who became political mercenaries during the (1984—2002) Karachi conflict involving Pakistan’s ethno-nationalist Mohajir party, the MQM. It explores the affective domain... more
This article investigates practices of militancy amongst young men who became political mercenaries during the (1984—2002) Karachi conflict involving Pakistan’s ethno-nationalist Mohajir party, the MQM. It explores the affective domain which emerges out of ethnicized positions on identity, and its role in structuring political subjectivity and violent action. Political killings were not solely driven through class, deprivation or ethnic politics, but also by idealized images of manhood and desires for creating and restoring selfhood in meaningful ties with other militants. While the violence led MQM into government, for militants it produced an incommensurable relationship between generativeness and violence in which deep disappointments and fractured masculinities were powerfully inscribed.
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The article draws on biographical, autoethnographic and experimental forms of writing in order to reflect on the intergenerational transmission of war and displacement in the late colonial period of British rule in Hong Kong, and Japanese... more
The article draws on biographical, autoethnographic and experimental forms of writing in order to reflect on the intergenerational transmission of war and displacement in the late colonial period of British rule in Hong Kong, and Japanese occupation. Intimate histories across three generations reveal experiences typically neglected by customary Chinese or colonial readings of the period. Specifically, the article privileges breathing as a site for analysing the interplay between body and home, dwelling and displacement, and the corporeal and psychic transmission of Chinese patriarchy and Anglo-Chinese intra-familial relations. It links the body as a dwelling for assaults on the ability to breathe—through tuberculosis, opium smoking, asthma and panic—with the physical home that is, in turn, assaulted by bombs, killing, intimate betrayals and fatal illness. Aptly, the Covid-19 “pandemic of breathlessness,” during which the research was conducted, serves as a mnemonic for the reprisal ...
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This thesis analyses the Karachi conflict involving Pakistan's ethnonationalist Mohajir party, the Muttahida Quami Movement (MOM) (c.1984-2002). The thesis is innovative in analysing recruitment to violence from a biographical and... more
This thesis analyses the Karachi conflict involving Pakistan's ethnonationalist Mohajir party, the Muttahida Quami Movement (MOM) (c.1984-2002). The thesis is innovative in analysing recruitment to violence from a biographical and historical perspective. The arguments derive from retrospective ethnography in a Mohajir neighbourhood, a comparative values survey of two political parties, Iifehistory interviews with MOM 'killers' and personal involvement over twelve years. . The study explores the historical interface between social, political, cultural and individual processes of violence. It theorises an interdisciplinary framework in order to examine the complex ways that ethnic and class inequalities and political and economic competition and conflicts 'without' connect with fantasised elements of aggression 'within' collective and individual identities mobilised around ethnicised violence. I show how oppressive social and political realities were repres...
A new book by a journalist follows five interlocutors through Karachi’s recent history of rapid expansion, corruption, violence, and civil society efforts.
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Additional file 3. Focus group discussion guide. Focus Group Discussion guide developed for the purpose of this study.
The new willingness by publishers to enlist the controversies that violence in Karachi entails brings into conversation - in this book - some prominent academics, ethnographers, journalists, writers and activists.This diverse coalition... more
The new willingness by publishers to enlist the controversies that violence in Karachi entails brings into conversation - in this book - some prominent academics, ethnographers, journalists, writers and activists.This diverse coalition provokes shifts awayfrom recursive academic and media scripts of the city toward a different ‘counter-public’ of cultural and political commentary, as contributors critically unpack the constitutive relation of violence to personal experience and create new understandings that are tentatively shared. The book drills down into the city’s neighbourhoods - to examine ways violence is textured locally and citywide into protest drinking, social and religious movements, class and cosmopolitanism, gang wars, the fractured lives of militants and journalists, uncertain continuua between state political and individual madness, and ways the painful shattering of some worlds produces dreams of others. While the individual chapters each provide fresh insights, the...
